What you won’t hear them say is the Truth — “Money is an objectivization of value.” It’s there so we can visualize and touch something as intangible as the letter “A”.

How many parents here are familiar with the plastic letter blocks popular in pre-school classrooms? These are bright colored three-dimensional block-like representations of the letter “A” and “B” and so on.

The children can pick these up and hold them in their hands and turn them around and come to recognize the shapes as “meaning” letter “A”, and later they learn to associate sounds from the spoken language with the symbol…..and so, learn to read and write and communicate using symbols that would otherwise have no meaning at all.

It’s the exact same thing with money, only we suffered arrested development along the way and didn’t draw the right connections between fact and fantasy, between the three dimensional thing in our hand (coinage, dollars, etc.) and the symbol on the bank ledger (dollars, cents, etc. ) and the universal language of energy that gives the symbols meaning.

Now we have to grow up and make that next connection.

The entire symbolism of money is about the exchange of energy, whether it’s exchanging my skill as a hairstylist for your need for a haircut, or it’s exchanging the value of my strawberries for your hunger for strawberry shortcake.

On one side of the transaction you have a need and on their other side, you have a fulfillment of that need. The person fulfilling the need gets a symbolic reward — money, for doing the job, raising the strawberries, and so on.

Money is supposed to be a Good Conduct Medal, a symbol that you gave more than you got. It’s something that you can hold in your hand and say to someone else, “See there? I gave more than I got, and there’s the proof.”

And because you gave more than you got, you are entitled to come back at a later date when you have some need and “cash it in” — say, you break your leg. Now you need help. The money stands as a symbol that you, specifically, earned help. You have, by your own efforts, pre-earned the effort of others.

And around and around it goes.

It’s all about the exchange of energy and goodwill, at least, that is what it is supposed to be about. Ideally, everyone earns enough to meet their own needs and the needs of their families and everything is just hunky-dory, but we all know that it doesn’t always work out that way.

“For lo, the poor are with you always….even until the end.”

The poor don’t have enough resources to trade — enough energy — in any form. They don’t have strawberries. They don’t know how to cut hair. So they don’t have the means to earn money, either.

When you give to the poor, it’s a one-way exchange of their need for your energy credit. Heaven clocks your reward, but the nuts and bolts world gives you no banana in exchange.

So the poor are like a heat sink in a monetary system. They take and they don’t give back anything, except their need. It turns out that in the great scheme of things, their need is important and a blessing and a gift, because it means that there is always somewhere for money to go and an opportunity for us to give without getting a Good Conduct Medal in return.

This is important because it is one of the few ways that we can gain the necessary insight to grow beyond money and the need to “objectify” value. By giving to the poor, we may go from hanging onto to chunky plastic letter “A” and even move beyond the “A” printed on a ledger, and get to the language of energy and the true meaning and use of what is being symbolized.

We, yes, even we, might learn to “read” and “write” in the language of energy, just as we have learned to read and write spoken languages and music and mathematics. The poor provide us with a way to end our sentences and make our pauses in this new language. They provide the commas and the periods when we need one.

Thieves are another proposition. They steal your energy credit and do things with it that you wouldn’t do. You might put your credit toward needed dental work or painting your house. The thieves–because they are criminals, after all –have a tendency to put it toward building fancy unnecessary dwellings, luxuries, financing illegal drugs, new porn movies, and bombs.

So the problem with thieves is not a matter of interfering with the transfer of energy by ending the cycle of it, but rather a matter of sidetracking or derailing the meaning that good and decent people intend. They take our Good Conduct Medals and throw them to the four winds, so instead of our energy credit building things that are beautiful and needed, the thieves fritter everything away on vanities and destructive spending that actually impairs the quality of life for everyone.

Most of us instinctively know that money —separated from its meaning in a far larger context—isn’t worth much, if anything, at all. Most of us are intrigued by the power we ascribe to it. And most people never know that in its essence money is part of a language that we don’t speak.

If you were to take all the different kinds of money there are and toss an example of each into a basket and think of them as letters instead of dollars and pounds and dinar and pesos, you would have a better grasp of the task before us and what kind of a transition we are being asked to make.

We are to take these symbols and use them the same way we use letters to form words and make sentences, to build meaning and convey it to others, only this meaning is about the deployment of our energy and what we most truly value.

The topic and medium of this language is, always, what do we value: guns or butter? Life or death? Love or hate?

Making our monetary symbols say what we want them to say is of primal importance to us and to our world. We must learn to communicate in the language of money just as we communicate with letters and numbers and musical notes, and as we do this we must establish a better more universal “grammar” for money, so that the meaning we intend is not subverted and our Will concerning the use of our energy is fulfilled.

Many generations of people have wished for world peace and they have wished to do good by the Earth and by other people, but because they haven’t controlled and combined and properly applied their monetary symbols, that wish has not been fulfilled.

In order to manifest our world the way we want it to be, we need to learn how to “speak” using money.